stomach in bad shape. I should gaze upon more pleasant subjects. then too, I don’t look so good either. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

[February 23, 1965]

[* * *] I now stoke up me cigar and plus with the coffee comes ye steam of bullshit, so gear your readies, pat yr paddy belly, wipe the come off yr nuts, & hearken baby like a white horse in moonlight listening for the last rider slipping up thru the elms.—I don’t know much about the phoney-non-phoney theory of lit., but it might be best to keep the ear down to the heart, not like Emily Post, but more like the assassin or the garage mechanic with Saturday night off, but I don’t know if talking about the stuff helps too much. think maybe the easy way is best: I mean let it slip out like a wet fish outa your drunken hands; and, of course, if the fish intends on staying, you got a stink, you don’t have much chance. Planning seldom gets it, although the way you lift your coffee cup or brand a steer or dip the thing into the cobwebbed dauber, might. Speaking of writing (aren’t we?) I get much more stuff back than I ever get rid of, which keeps me kind of puritan about how much moxie I do or am supposed to have.

yes, I’ve heard about C. from other sources; evidently he runs up the gall mast of most. I guess he makes too much money for most, and the other things too, yet I can’t get flamed-up. I too like to sit around in safety and I drink endless cans and bottles of beer and smoke cigars until I am senseless and ultra senseless and I go on go on within the seeming peace of rented walls, o lifting and drinking rivers of that yellow piss and pissing it out and listening not to jazz like a good human but to the symphony, the large orange flaming red green white fires of curling steam steel leafy hammer sound sound and form, and men centuries old walk around inside of me, and I feel them feeling it, saying it as if they were sitting across the table from me, lifting a beercan and saying, “Bukowski, it’s hot shit. everything’s shit shit, yet look maybe—I don’t know. I may not make it. have you ever seen a yellow dog pissing in the yellow sun? Bukowski, rip me open another beer!” I can come crashing in from the racetrack where maybe I have nipped away at a half pint or pint of scotch during the action, but this liquor hardly contains anything except maybe a bridge to walk across so I can get over and past the 50,000 faces whirling dead en masse like other things—like flies, like rocks, like turds. it gets me over.—now I used to hang in the bars, peering through the smoke, lipping the bartenders, walking out into the alley (usually for a beating), fumbling at the whores, and often ending rolled or in jail. after some many many years of this, Mozart or Bobby Strauss or Stravinsky does not seem too bad over a familiar tablecloth and a couple of salt and pepper shakers and a calendar of a peaceful cat. yet, I still gang outside now and then, and there’s trouble trouble, and the last time I woke up in a jail with piped-in music, and a kid with a broken arm on the floor next to me. When the last I remember was being in a fancy apartment and lifting some girl’s dress up to her waist and kissing her legs. Somewhere along the line madness enters and the police enter, and it’s the same old thing. or it’s getting home, and hemorrhage again, very close to death again. Some blood and then lying still as a rock, listening hoping for the mending of the threads not quite ready to go. someday they won’t mend; meanwhile I am writing this letter to you.